Debris from a Delta II Second Stage Rocket Falls in South Africa

With Acknowledgement to the SAAO (South African Astronomical Observatory)

Remnants of the Delta II Rocket (used to launch NAVSTAR GPS satellites) that fell over the Western Cape.

On April 27 2000, mysterious glowing objects began falling out of the Western Cape sky. The largest fell on a farm about 37 km NE of the centre of Cape Town, only 13 km from the centre of the suburb of Durbanville. Another landed about 70 km further ESE at Lemoenpoort (100 km ENE of Cape Town and 25 km south of the town of Worcester). A third hit the ground another 24 km further ESE, near the town of Robertson. The story about the Lemoenpoort `space ball' broke first, with 15-year old Theodore Solomons telling how a `glowing hot' ball `came out of nowhere, straight at me. It didn't come from straight above, but at an angle. Then I ran away and I heard something like two gunshots when the ball hit the ground' only meters away, but it `didn't make much of a dent'. It was still too hot to touch half an hour later, when farmer Pieter Viljoen arrived. Labourers in his vineyards had told him about a shining ball that hit the ground 50 m from where they were working, and as soon as it was cool enough he loaded the mysterious intruder into his bakkie (pickup truck) for storage in his barn. It eventually ended up being investigated by the Department of Civil Aviation at Cape Town International Airport, who soon realized this was not part of any known aircraft.

Chris Koen at SAAO found himself fielding media calls the next day, with the media apparently reasoning that astronomers ought to know about things that come from the sky. After a hasty consultation with retired SAAO astronomer and satellite tracking hobbyist Greg Roberts, Chris was able to suggest various bits of orbital debris that might conceivably have come down to earth that day.

But the story didn't die, as over the weekend newspapers began reporting the landing of a much bigger, oblong object on Buurmanskraal, Philip Scher's farm, near Durbanville. Neighbour Lampies Lampbrecht heard `a sort of crack and then an explosion', and some of his farm workers saw the glowing `ball' land on Scher's farm a short distance away. Lampbrecht said it looked like a 3000-litre water tank. Monday, 1 May, was a holiday, but SAAO's Dave Laney found himself rousted out of bed by media calls about this latest rusty intruder from outer space, which early reports said had fallen a day after the first `space ball'. A bit of hasty web research showed that a suspiciously similar object had fallen near Georgetown, Texas on January 22, 1997 --- a propellant tank from the second stage of a Delta II rocket. A team of e-tv reporters who arrived for an interview later in the day looked at the web page picture and immediately identified the Durbanville `spaceball' as almost identical to the Texas object, in size, shape and appearance. Alan Pickup in Edinburgh quickly posted an analysis giving the likely culprit as the Delta II second stage rocket from the launch of a GPS satellite in March 1996. It was predicted to decay around the time when eyewitnesses reported the various falling objects (between 1300 and 1330 UTC), and it was over the Cape at the right time. New interviews by reporters established that all objects had in fact fallen on the same day at roughly the same time.

On May 3, a report previously buried in a local newspaper reached Cape Town. The Afrikaans newspaper `Die Burger' reported that Bertie Nel, manager of Le Grande Chasseur wine cellar near Robertson, had heard a noise `like a helicopter', then looked up to see a glowing object apparently 150 m up and falling fast. About a second later it had made a dent in the yard of Mnr Wouter de Wet some 200 m away, splashing hot metal as it landed. A piece of what looked like rubber appeared to be melting in the heat. This was the `thrust chamber' (exhaust nozzle), `about as large as a 20-litre drum'. It hit the ground at 1530 SAST on April 27, farthest east along the track of the orbiting rocket stage and presumably last to land.

Reports and pictures matched what would be expected if these were bits of a Delta II second stage, but it was time for a personal view. The first close encounter was at the Kraaifontein police station's vehicle pound, where Case Rijsdijk and Dave Laney of SAAO photographed the main propellant tank. Captain Jane Cohen was more than willing to deliver it to SAAO for safekeeping the next day. Sightseers kept arriving to see the `space ball', and the vehicle pound offered no protection from rain. The Robertson police were just as happy to give up the exhaust nozzle, providing Case drove out to fetch it. It took a bit more persuasion to get the civil aviation authorities to give up the Worcester object, which proved to be one of the pressurisation spheres mounted around the base of a Delta II second stage. Currently all three objects are in SAAO's mechanical workshop, and it's hoped that they will go on display in Cape Town's new MTN ScienCentre.

Nobody was hurt by the falls in the U.S. or South Africa, though a bit of `gauze' hit a woman in Oklahoma. So far the only `sky is falling' casualty is a Cuban cow hit by another piece of American space hardware years ago. The propellant tank definitely took some hits in orbit before falling on South Africa, however. Photographs show a number of micrometeorite pits from small bits of debris. Even a fleck of paint can make a surprisingly large dent when travelling at 30 000 km/h.